Sissel Tolaas – an alphabet for the nose

„Smell [..] is a highly elusive phenomenon. Odours, unlike colors, for instance, cannot be named – at least not in European languages. ‘It smells like…‘, we have to say when describing an odour, groping to express our smell experience by means of metaphors. Nor can odours be recorded: there is no effective way of either capturing scents or storing them over time. In the realm of olfaction, we must make do with descriptions and recollections.“ (Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The cultural history of smell (UK: Routledge, 1994), p.3)